Since its origins, the platform’s micro-narratives have copied traditional storytelling genres (like the TV interview), reconfigured others (like the written diary versus the diary videoblog) and created new native categories from scratch.

It’s clear that YouTube native genres will help your brand create storytelling content that already enjoys a solid number of fans and even a certain audience seasonality that can reinforce your marketing plan. The question for marketers, however, is how to get that seemingly real connection with a regular joe that influencers provide, while still enjoying the control over the message and consistency that traditional brand-driven advertising used to offer.

Storytelling is the answer. Asking your influencers to use narrative genres in their videos will provide recognizable and regular patterns of communication for your brand while still allowing enough room for influencers’ creativity, as well as the freedom for their much-needed spontaneity.

Ten popular YouTube native genres that can be adapted for branded content success:

“Unboxing”: This micro-genre plays with the excitement and expectation of opening boxes -normally coveted tech gadgets or high-end cosmetics, which the audience is already familiar with. There is the joy of ripping open the package, the aesthetic aspect of how the good is boxed or presented (beautiful or utilitarian packaging) and the satisfaction, or deception, with the new acquisition. The Unbox Therapy Channel is a reference in the genre.

“P.O. Box”: This genre was born when bloggers started receiving commercial samples and free products from companies. In these videos, content creators vlogged their journey to the P.O. Box as well as the opening of the parcel itself. The genre went to new dimensions as fans started to send YouTubers gifts. This added complicity as the influencer would say the fan’s name on camera, read their heartwarming or funny messages, showed excitement for what was received and made jokes about the gift or expressed his or her gratitude.

3. “What’s in my X?”: This genre plays to the curiosity of the audience. The influencer reveals his or her calculated “perfect imperfections” by showing what apps are in his o her iPhone, what’s items he or she carries around in their bag, what’s in their makeup collection or gives a room or house tour, etc. here and also following the influencer´s educational advice on how to organize your life. You need these apps in your iphone, this is what you should be carrying in your bag, copy me to make the most of your tiny bedroom etc.

4. “Draw my life”: The influencer sketches in high-speed the most relevant chapters of his or her life in a whiteboard while his or her voiceover narrates the story. The key ingredient here is the intimacy created by the voiceover and the gratitude the YouTuber expresses towards his audience for making his or her life so amazing.

5. “Haul”: The influencer displays items recently purchased and reviewsthem or gives ¨first impressions¨. The hauls can be thematic (makeup, household items, clothes etc.) or seasonal (Fall, Summer, Boxing Day, Black Friday etc.). The video saves the consumer from having to go see the items themselves and know whether they still want to purchase them or not.

6. Challenges: Being the Ice Bucket Challenge a planetary meme, this genre doesn’t need an introduction. The main attraction is watching someone´s journey through ridicule and suffering like drinking a bottle wasabi, or eating a jar of mayo… or getting soaked. The argh! moment is the hero. Here is what Tide did with this genre:

7. Fridge tours: Learning about people´s personal tastes and diet habits, from compulsive eaters to paleo fanatics, made this genre a YouTube classic.

8. What´s in my mouth?: two or more YouTubers make a collaboration in which one is blindfolded and the other puts things in his/her mouth to guess what they are. The point is to laugh and lightly torture whoever is blindfolded by putting disgusting and not-always-edible things in his/her mouth.

9. My boyfriend or girlfriend does my makeup: this is done by two YouTubers, usually a boy and a girl. The boy will try to do a full face of makeup for the girl to disastrous results. We all, including the girl and the boy, will laugh at the boy for his ignorance on how to apply makeup.

10. Trying candy from X: Influencers try sweets from foreign countries on-camera. Explaining the candy’s origin, comparing them with local brands and arggh! and mmm! flashes are the stellar moments.

These examples are no anecdotes or isolated memes, but fully consolidated storytelling genres that didn´t exist ten or even five years ago. They enjoy millions of views and loyal fans, have their own YouTube icons, traditional celebrities doing cameos and genre hybrids. There are plenty of opportunities for brands to grasp.

Do you know of more YouTube native genres?

For ideas and tips on marketing, storytelling and communication, you can join Antonio Nunez´s free newsletter at antonionunez.com or follow his Twitter @AntonNunez

Ad Blocking services are booming because we, marketing people, are failing to create relevant and likable digital advertising. The more intrusive and harassing our advertising becomes, the more people turn to ad blocking. Continue reading →

Brand Planners. User Experience Planners. Shopper Planners. Digital Planners. Social media planners. Content Planners. Channel Planners. You-name-it planners. Many big agencies´ strategic departments are said to resemble a scary Tower of Babel: flooded with data, confronted by hyper specialized jargons and unable to create unifying brand metrics. They are criticized for working at turtle pace and for being fragmented by narrow discipline-oriented points of view.

Many creative teams complain about having to pay the toll in this situation. They are forced to spend more time trying to find an overarching theme for campaigns, which means less time to craft their storytelling productions. Many marketers too. They are left to build their brands relying almost solely on brand personality and tone of voice consistency. Their brands can’t generate true meaningful conversations, relying on a collection of key visuals or on superficial anecdotes to influence consumers’ perceptions or behaviors. Those brands end-up lacking purpose and a distinctive point of view.

This Tower of Babel Syndrome is not a new thing. Different planning disciplines have always been at war. However, this “war” should not be viewed as a bad thing, it has been the necessary evil that has helped agencies confront the challenges of each communication era.

Creatives vs Researchers

The in-house researcher era: Agencies hired research practitioners tasked with infusing creativity with the rigor of public opinion research. And so, the tensions between art and science, between images and numbers and between creatives and pollsters were born. Kellogg’s cereal brand advertising, for example, was a result of the tensions of this era.

Researches vs Creative Planners

But then some pollsters became not only efficacy controllers but also a source of inspiration. The second chapter of the strategic planning evolution was the conflict between research practitioners and creative planners. The first having strong statistical and analytical skills, the latter armed with storytelling capabilities and intuition to find the intersection between insights and creative ideas. The planning role was not only about proving the ads to be efficient anymore; it was also about inspiring the creative teams. An agency’s goal became converting the right data into actionable insights. Nike brand advertising could be an example of the conflicts of this era.

Brand Planners vs Digital planners

The digital revolution created a third type of holly grail for the planning community: the “digital first” strategy. Traditional “brand planners” and the then called “digital planners” were meant to work together in harmony. The ideal was to marry the traditional “Push” culture of brand planners with the emerging “Pull” culture of digital planners. The resulting team needed to integrate “old” and “new” abilities: On one side, synthesis, single-minded messaging and perception analysis capabilities and on the other side, consumer behavior analysis, content creation and friction-less information architecture creation capabilities. The dream was to create grounded real-time brand storytelling through brand experiences. Apple communications could be an example of this chapter´s conflict.

Storytelling Planners vs Experience Planners

Consumer’s mantra nowadays seems to be “stop telling me stories and give me an amazing free app”. For brands to stay relevant they are required to be meaningful and entertaining and also to offer useful products and services that provide an added value. Planning teams need to merge their abilities to create pervasive storytelling with the ability to design new products and come up with original business ideas. They also have to work closer to advertiser’s business models, not only to their marketing plans. An example of brand communication from this era could be Uber or Airbnb.

Planning teams vs the future

As for the future, I suspect that, not too far from today, agencies will need to curb the gap between storytelling and story-doing. In an era of generalized skepticism, brands will need to make their brand stories tangible. Planners will be asked to deliver against the old Roman Emperor’s adagio “panem et circenses” (bread and circus): Brand utility and entertaining, meaningful storytelling.

In order to roll with the times and the new conflicts that await us, strategic planning departments will need to learn how to:

-1. Focus on what we strategists share in common, instead of trying to exacerbate the full nuances of our different strategy disciplines.

-2. Find integrative metaphors and vocabulary to function as one team.

-3. Work more iteratively and not sequentially.

-4. Assume with humbleness that the one million metrics that used to calm clients (and agency leaders) cannot replace our intuition or the scary trial and error system.

-5. Embrace that strategy today is much less glamorous, it is about making infinite small tweaks and not about the romantic eureka moment of the next Big Idea.

One thing I know for certain about the planning war is that Planners of all disciplines will need to embrace conflict and friction as part of our daily reality in order to finish the construction of the Tower, unlike what happened in Babel.

A version of this article originally appeared on WARC.com under the title “5 Tips on the future of Strategic Planning”.

For ideas and tips on marketing, storytelling and communication, you can join Antonio Nunez´s free newsletter at antonionunez.com or follow his Twitter @AntonNunez

Content is the new king of marketing, they say. It´s not. Content that make people talk is.

Renault UK created a life sized Scalextric race in London featuring the all-electric Renault ZOE.

Nike created a chalkbot to promote their LiveStrong campaign during the Tour de France 2009. While people, in real time, send texts to a web, a robot wrote their messages on the road.

Starting in 2011 the Colombian Ministry of Defense promotes demobilization amongst FARC guerrilla members during Christmas. For their campaigns they set up illuminated Christmas trees in the middle of the forest and invite guerrilla member´s families to send messages to their relatives in capsules distributed by letting them float down the rivers. In the capsules, the families put letters, pictures or small Christmas presents. Their letters usually ask their relatives to demobilize and come home.

It doesn´t matter if these campaign executions look poorly made or even fake, if they are advertising or propaganda or if they are traditional advertising, guerrilla campaigns or Ideas Bigger than an Ad. They all work because they reach their goal: they make people talk about them. And people do it because the stories have conflict, they are full of emotions and sensations and they contain truth. Let your story spread the word.

Brand Storytelling is not about using the old broadcast mentality: producing static content. It´s about helping people to engage in conversations around contents.

For ideas and tips on marketing, storytelling and communication, you can join Antonio Nunez´s free newsletter at antonionunez.com or follow his Twitter @AntonNunez